


Snows

by Teland



Series: Snows [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Backstory, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-12-11
Updated: 1998-12-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 11:00:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20993702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teland/pseuds/Teland
Summary: Alex's childhood was very normal.





	Snows

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to ciceqi for beta!

When I was young, I would sit in the back seat of Papa's soft, quiet sedan and watch the trees roll by as he drove to mysterious appointment after mysterious appointment.

It was always trees. Though we lived in the suburbs, the meetings were always in the empty places. It was easy to think that anyone, anything at all could live in those woods.... even after I'd realized that there was nothing behind those thick, green lines but the homes of the rich and hermitic.

I was perhaps eleven or so, and my greatest wish was to live in those houses, if only so that I could be there when whatever strange, marvelous things came out in the bright, clean moonlight. 

The strange was always treasured, for my childhood was very normal. Our home was never louder than the expensive engine of the sedan, our meals never jittered with broken crockery or the sound of siblings.

I was an only child, and I was taught to be respectful, to emulate my parents in all ways. Our home was as any home should be, I think, though I was luckier than most.

Not every child gets to learn at his father's side, after all. 

Not just anyone is given a mother who was as loving and conscientious as my own. 

Some of my business associates only learned to use and maintain their weapons after some disaster -- my father put the gun in my hand himself when I was a child, and carefully helped me to hold and care for it as if it was my own limb.

My mother never let a day pass without helping me with my language and performance abilities. Smiling and hugging me when I had learned to lie to her in my third language, letting me bake with her, letting me lick the spoon.

It was always calm and quiet, and I never doubted my place. Never.

I was a lucky child, and, like all lucky children, I wanted more. Greedy and ungrateful, I searched our library for fantasies of conflict and chaos. I would darken the room to the point where there was *almost* insufficient light to read by, and pretend the shadows hid creatures who wanted my life and soul. That the sweet smell of fresh bread masked other, darker scents.

It was indulgent, foolish. Mama and Papa never brought their work home.

But I was young, and such things were allowed with a smile and quiet laughter. Papa believed that a good imagination was the clearest sign of an adaptable mind -- something I would need. 

And when the winters came, I was grateful, for the snows would blanket the hills, obscuring, misleading. For a few months every year I could believe the wonders of the other world were hidden from my eyes by the *world's* nature, and not my own. 

I wasn't unworthy of the sights, simply unpracticed in their hunt.

I always knew that someday I'd learn to squint my eyes just *so*, and be pulled into the worlds of my imagining. I would miss my parents, but the pain would make me stronger, and Papa would be proud of me for the sacrifice. 

And the snows would eventually hide me, too. 

The first time I saw a wolf I was 15, and we were in the old country for Mama's work. Papa and I didn't see her very often, and so we would take supplies and the dogs deep into the ancestral forests to hunt the deer and the bear. The former would be given to the villagers after Papa had dressed and cleaned the carcasses, the latter would line our clothes, floors, and walls in the bitterness of deep Russian winter.

It was the happiest time of my life. 

It was as though my fantasies had come true. I had the freedom to roam for miles in the clear darkness of seemingly endless night, knowing that around any bend could lurk a maddened creature that could tear me apart with one swipe of its paw.

And I also knew that, whenever I chose, I could return to the dacha and share tea and stories with my father. 

The warmth was always sweeter after a time away, and in my youth... in my youth I would treasure it as deeply as I knew how to do, and run from it as soon as I'd squeezed out every last precious gem of normality.

I wanted it to be just as sweet when I returned again, you see.

The daughter of the local handyman found me pleasing to the eye, and would follow me to an abandoned shed just outside her village some of the nights I roamed. Her hair was thick and dark, falling to the sides of a heart-shaped face, her eyes perfect black in moonlight. I would take her, and send her back to her father and home, knowing she thought herself wild for the transgression. Knowing she'd never follow me any deeper. 

I treasured my petty tragedies, as well.

After I had sent her away, I would continue the night's hunt, occasionally brushing trees with my hands. Her scent lingered on them, and I told myself that someday I'd be able to find my way home by that alone, should I ever become truly lost.

It was one of those nights that I saw the wolf. I'd been standing stock-still at one of my marked trees, teaching myself to tease the scents of pine and bark away from that of my lovely peasant's sex, eyes closed and reaching with all that I was for the ephemera of adolescent lust.

All of a sudden, a deep breath left me awash with wildness, aggression and hunger. I opened my eyes slowly. Twenty metres away stood the wolf, fur thick and grey, matted with blood that may or may not have been its own. The sharpness of the scent made the thing definitely male, and its eyes were amber viewed through a heavy green glass. He stared at me, tongue lolling, and I carefully avoided direct eye contact. I had been foolish -- my rifle was slung over my back and the chances of it getting stuck in my hood if I tried to free it were too high. A false move would leave me staining the snow, and I knew I would not live long enough to scream for help. 

An endless stretch of time, and I felt my nose and ears begin to ache with the cold, and my eyes itched to meet the vastly inhuman stare of the wolf, but I just stood there, and waited.

A crunch of paw sinking through the thin ice crust.

He was closer.

Another.

I knew -- *knew* -- that I would die, and desperately tried to force my being to Mama, in her lab, for I had not seen her in days.

And then, in the distance, a brief and purposeful chorus of howls. My animal companion took another step toward me and growled. He was being called home before prey could be properly killed and devoured. I could understand the anger.

Another chorus and he raised his head to me, compelling a shared glance. His eyes burned in the pale light of the gibbous moon, and his breath steamed. It was an acknowledgement. I would be safe from him this night, but if we ever were to meet again...

I swallowed shamelessly as he turned and bounded to the North, felt my knees knock for a spare few moments of rational fear. And then... and then I *wanted*. I had escaped death, yes, and the song of adrenaline in my blood as natural as any animal's, but...

But I had shamed myself as hunter, allowed my confidence to turn me into prey. Suddenly, it was clear. The wonders, the forest beasts had hidden themselves from me because I *was* unworthy, and I vowed it would never happen again.

My sweet, comfortable life had softened me, perhaps irrevocably. I had the skills, I had the knowledge... but I lacked the *instinct*. I thought of my reflection in the mirror, and knew that my eyes had never burned like those of the wolf. I knew that the snows would never swallow me in shadow and misty runs. Not like that.

And when, some three weeks later, I returned home from another night's roaming to find our dacha stripped of life and family, I was grateful. I knew that whoever came for me would set me on the proper path.

It turned out to be a man who appeared to be some ten years older than my father, but who moved like the wolf. I was to call him 'sir,' and I was 18 before I was allowed to call him by his favored name -- Peskow. 

I don't think he taught me anything my parents couldn't have taught, but his methods were vastly different. It was from him that I learned how lucky I had been. It was from him that I learned how different I was from other children. They were the prey, or perhaps the low members of the pack. 

I was to be a leader. 

He was hard, and he was cold, and he was all I had of family after being stripped of my name and heritage. In the days of chill and broken rest, I counted myself superior -- for I had known enough to treasure the times I'd had as a child, and I never, never allowed myself to forget the scent of Mama's sugared breads. 

I learned my place, and Peskow made absolutely sure I learned to loathe it, as well. And while my inability to settle under the leash has earned me more scars than triumphs, it has also guaranteed that I will never be anyone but myself.

It would be wrong not to be grateful for that, and so I toast his shadowy self, and will never kill him as he wishes me to do -- it would mock all his work to make me an individual. No, I will use him until that day his reflexes crumble at precisely the wrong moment, and he is nothing more impressive than an old man who died more interestingly than most. I think he would appreciate the quiet indignity of it. 

And if he doesn't... well, he'll be dead. He can argue with me in whatever passes for the afterlife of people like us. 

When I was handed off to Peskow's masters I received nothing more useful than an extended civics lesson. I was to be a Patriot, I was to go back to America -- they tried to make sure that I would never think of it as home again -- and infiltrate the governments behind the governments. And make my reports. 

It was shockingly simple to get inside. I not only had the skills, but Peskow had been very careful to keep my face free of disfiguring marks. And Mama had been assiduous in making sure I developed precisely that air of amoral innocence that makes men such as those I have worked for ache with that brand of intellectual lust best suited to Victorian drawing rooms. 

I fell in love with America again, of course. Few other countries instill such a massive love and need for personal power in their youth. Here, even among the people that were supposed to *know* better, the constant struggle to be first among equals was always screwing *something* up. I learned early to show perfect loyalty to none, because, though it left me untrusted by all, it also left me relatively safe from the periodic purges the silly old men indulged in. 

Relatively. 

In the way of these men, it made perfect sense that I would be sent to perform some strange act of destruction on Mulder. Shooting or discrediting him would disrupt the power balance dangerously. It was more... fair... to simply try to drive him crazy with guilt, self-doubt, and possibly lust. My Russian employers were never sure whether to appreciate the complexity of the move or just make the long-delayed takeover bid sooner because the stupidity of the Americans demanded it. 

Sometimes I can't help but believe that Peskow went overboard in his lessons on individuality. I've never had a master in whom I could have perfect faith even if I'd *wanted* to. 

Then again, I know my idealization of the dark places must have showed. Peskow felt that a person who believed in anything at all could never be trusted to keep himself free of emotional entanglement. And he was right. 

It was immediately obvious that Mulder shared both my distrust of authority and my desperation to people the shadows with the death of the mundane. It was immediately obvious that I could be precisely the person to share his life. I tailored myself away from the adoring greenhorn the old men wanted as much I could. I showed myself willing to be led astray, as opposed to simply offering an example of his long-since-corrupted youth. 

I was supposed to make him long for his own false innocence, and so drive himself mad. Instead, I tried to seduce him into taking me under his wing, making me into the wild, powerful thing he so clearly longed to be. 

If there's one lesson learned with time, it is that you never stop being younger than you think you are. That is, I may have been a grown man, but I was still foolish. My plans would've meshed neatly enough with those of the old men -- the end result would be Mulder, leaving his career to show me his own snowlands -- but the old men were foolish enough to toy with their own works. 

When Mama taught me how to cook, she taught me the importance of leaving the food to prepare itself after a time. It only took one painfully over-spiced dish for the lesson to drive itself home. These men... these men know no subtlety. My mother would have made ten of them -- and would not have stinted at wiping them from the face of the earth. She would not have settled for their underlings. 

But it was left to me to try and finish their hopeless little jobs, and when the plans, of course, failed, it was always I who took the brunt of the punishment. There comes a time when one has to wonder just how much suffering one actually needs...

It was almost a relief to find myself under the Brit. He had always been the most rational of the bunch, gaining a reputation for a distinct lack of resolve simply because he didn't occasionally froth at the mouth and kill off his rivals' employees. He was, of course, the one the Russians distrusted the most, and the irony... Well, the vaccine I stole from them -- burning my old bridges -- was what found me in his employ. 

That distrust meant he was the one they wanted information on the most, though.... It's entirely possible that I'll be able to worm my way back on the inside with some choice tidbits from his segment of the organization. 

Or it would've been possible if he wasn't so decidedly *dead*. 

As annoying as it is to keep track of the people and governments I have some influence with, it's just painful to lose an alliance forever. I'll find a way back into their good graces, somehow. 

Perhaps after I solidify my own place. I will train the smoker's prodigal for him, and kill him when the project inevitably fails. They've never seen me be brutal with a protege before. I will impress them with my ruthlessness, where circumstances had made me appear weak before. 

I will. 

But it isn't time for that yet, and my life is my own. 

Or close enough to it as to make no difference. 

It suits me to continue the Brit's attempts to make Mulder an ally of business. I know he wants more of me, if not necessarily what *I* want him to want. I give him hints of tiny government corruptions to pique his interest, I whisper through his cell phone and thrill to hear him pause at the sound of my voice. 

I know he wouldn't be averse to my touch -- it's just a matter of enticing him to follow me to the edge of my woods... I know he wouldn't stop there. I know he has no need to prove himself wild. And maybe, after a time, he will see my eyes in contrast with the snows.

His gun isn't fast enough to stop me.

There is no pack that can call me away from pouncing on him and making him mine.

And then... and then I'll tell him what *really* lurks in the shadows. 

And perhaps I won't have to scramble so hard to maintain this life of mine. 

Or perhaps he'll just make the struggle entertaining again.

All this to justify another night of lingering outside his home... it will be all right so long as I can trust in my prey to always return.

A good hunter is thorough.

A good hunter is patient.

And if I squint my eyes just so, I am again surrounded by trees, bothered by no sound but my own breathing and the illusory hints of Mulder's presence. 

~~~~  
End.  
~~~~


End file.
